If you've read this week's issue of CityBeat, you can probably predict my recommendation for theater-going this weekend: It's Walter Mosley's The Fall of Heaven, getting its world premiere at the Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park. —-(Check out my review here.)
Mosley is a well-known novelist, but this is his first endeavor as a playwright, and it shows great promise. If you like Mosley's diverse detective novels (Easy Rawlins is his best known character), you know that he is fascinated by people on the edge of society, or even those slightly over the boundary into lawlessness. That's Tempest Landry, Fall of Heaven's protagonist. In fact, Landry's story (which Mosley first crafted in a collection of short pieces, The Tempest Tales) is about big issues of good and evil and how we justify our existence. But it's told in a vernacular, very contemporary way with an angel who's an accountant and the Devil himself, played as a Hard Rock star with the apparel to match.
The show is as entertaining as it is thought-provoking, and the set (by Tony Award winner David Gallo) is a mind-bending view of central Harlem and some of its greatest landmarks, including the Apollo Theatre and the Lenox Lounge.
I suspect that Mosley's venture into playwriting will be picked up by other theaters around the country — including New York City — so you should take an afternoon or an evening this weekend to see The Fall of Heaven so you can brag, once again, about Cincinnati's great theater scene.
